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	<title>Tom Gidden &#187; rant</title>
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		<title>And back again:  Leaving Three for Orange</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2010/09/18/and-back-again-leaving-three-for-orange/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2010/09/18/and-back-again-leaving-three-for-orange/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 18 Sep 2010 13:45:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cellphone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cellular]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gsm]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[iphone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[iphone4]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mobile]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mobile-phone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mobile-phones]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[orange]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[payg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rant]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[three]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/?p=108</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[After a couple of months with Three PAYG, I've moved to Orange PAYG.
Three was fine, with a good, cheap service.  However, I wasn't totally satisfied with their data rate.  Coverage was good, but data still seemed sluggish. While it was marginally better than O2, and substantially cheaper, I still feel it's not as good as it could be.  There's also something substantial missing from Three's PAYG offering: free WiFi.  The lack of The Cloud or BT Openwhatever on Three is particularly noticeable.  While I barely used it while on O2, there are several occasions where Three's coverage let me down and one of BT's nodes mocked me mercilessly sitting there with a strong signal in my iPhone's WiFi list.

Meanwhile, Orange and T-Mobile are doing the dirty in a new enterprise called "Everything Everywhere".  It looks like the two nets will merge, and so data coverage should be second-to-none.  In my opinion, Orange have always been the most technically competent UK network, and it's just their marketing and customer services I had a problem with.
Back then, I was really just using my phone as a phone, so there wasn't much technical reason to stick about; their poor CS was far more of a problem.  Nowadays, I use my phone much more for data than for phoning, so data coverage and performance is more important: what's the point in having a smartphone to check facts in the pub if the net is so slow that it's closing time before Wikipedia starts to appear.
So, I was eager to give Orange another go.  This time, it would be PAYG.  However, if you remember from my last post on this subject, Orange was stupidly not offering PAYG SIMs to existing iPhone 4 users, even though Apple sold record numbers of unlocked handsets.
They finally got their act together earlier this month, and started selling iPhone 4 PAYG SIMs.  I ordered one over the phone: £25, which was explained as £15 for the SIM, plus £10 top-up credit. A little excessive I feel, and I realised after ordering that I could have just ordered their standard £25/month rolling one-month SIM-only plan and got a better deal, switching to PAYG after the first month.
Anyway, the SIM arrived, and I promptly ordered my PAC code from Three, which arrived soon afterwards by text.  I added £5 of credit just in case, and then called Orange on Monday and gave them the PAC code.  I expected some form of confirmation via text or something, but... nothing.
I called back the next day and it turns out they hadn't submitted it.  Ugh.  This is, apparently, how it's going to go from now one.  So, I gave them the code again. This time, they confirmed the port for Thursday: two days later.  Fine.  Whatever.
Now, credit.  I paid for £10 of credit when I ordered the SIM.  I also was expecting £10 extra for porting my number, and they said something about giving me £10 of extra credit per month if I topped up with £10... I'm not sure about that last bit, though.  I was also, of course, expecting the promised free 250MB mobile data package.  This was all confirmed to me when I gave the PAC code on Tuesday, and I was assured that the data package was on the account and the credit was coming.
Anyway, on Thursday throughout the porting transition, I was checking "Your Account" on Orange.  My number had transferred, and yet my £5 of credit had dwindled to nothing even though I hadn't used it.  It turned out that 900kb of mobile data had used it up!  Hang on a sec... I thought I was getting free data?!  I distinctly remember being told on Tuesday that my account had the 250MB free data package...
A shouty call to Orange, and I was assured this was a mistake. The billing team was notified, but I was told that they could not guarantee I'd be reimbursed for the erroneously-used credit.  Oh well, it's only £5.
However, after this point I couldn't even call Orange because my account didn't have the requisite 25p to call them to tell them about their cock-ups.  As I was expecting at least £20 of credit to appear any moment, I was loathe to top-up... for a start, I think I have to top-up every month to get the promised benefits, so I don't really want to build up excess credit that'll never get used.
I did, however, get a text to say the 250MB package had finally been added.
Friday: still no credit.  A stern email to Orange demanding the £20 I was due plus the £5 their cock-up had wasted.  I was forced to add £10 of credit manually, just so I could make a call.
Saturday: I've just got a text saying I've been credited £20.  Still not right -- where's that £5, plus the 25p's I've been forking out to call Customer Services! -- but I have a feeling that's all I'm going to get out of them.
The problem here is that while the sales blurb says the account "comes with" free credit, free mobile data, etc., it all seems to be applied piecemeal with five-working-day turnarounds.  The number port really confused things too. It's pathetic. They clearly treat their PAYG customers far worse than their Contract customers, especially with this insult of a 25p Customer Services charge, when I'm calling about their mistakes.
Orange CS is very polite, and their agents seem genuinely eager to help.  However, they're stuck in a byzantine system of teams and systems and account details and scripts, and it just means things don't get fixed.  I hark back to the olden days when a single twenty-something in Patchway (or Glasgow?) would be able to sort everything out after spending 30 seconds listening and comprehending the customer's problem.  Now it's effectively a bunch of electronic note- and buck-passing between departments.
...I mean, even the fact that they couldn't offer SIMs to Apple unlocked-iPhone 4 customers on launch day or even for months afterwards shows how clueless they are.  I still maintain that was a massive missed opportunity for the network to steal a slew of affluent but irritated O2 customers.
If it wasn't for the much-vaunted Orange network, I'd hightail straight back to Three right now, and sign up for a proper contract with them.  I'm now going to use Orange for a few weeks and see how I get on.  If it isn't as good as it's supposed to be, I'll be off.  I know this isn't the biggest catastrophe in the world, but this kind of poor customer service just bugs the crap out of me.
A few years ago, I wrote about Orange and how they just weren't as good as they used to be.  I was hoping after a few years in the wilderness, I'd be pleasantly surprised.  I'm not.  Their service seems worse than ever.
...
Anyway. The next thing stuck in my craw is international data.  I'm off on holiday to WDW in November, and try as I may, I just can't find any economic or legit way to get two weeks of data access on either my iPad or my iPhone.  I just want a bit of email and limited web access just so we can organise things.  However, AT&#038;T seem hellbent in NOT offering service to non-residents.
I could just roam with my new Orange account, but apparently that will cost more than the holiday.  If I were paranoid, I'd suspect that the networks are colluding internationally to encourage their customers to give up and just fork out ~£5/MB.]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://gidden.net/tom/2010/09/18/and-back-again-leaving-three-for-orange/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
	
		<series:name><![CDATA[Leaving mobile phone company "X" for "Y"]]></series:name>
	</item>
		<item>
		<title>iTunes Library Regeneration</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/itunes-library-regeneration/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/itunes-library-regeneration/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 May 2007 12:48:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bug]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ipod]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[itunes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[podcasts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rant]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/itunes-library-regeneration/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The final major thing that "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod" has annoyed me from Day One:  the monolithic bloaty binary library, and the accompanying tidy-but-inefficient XML backup.  For a small library, it's no problem, but mine has major issues.  Heck, and I don't even consider my ~40GB library to be particularly big!

Over the past few months, I've noticed that iTunes has been getting slower and slower.  It's clear that iTunes doesn't scale particularly well.  For anything under, say, 5000 tracks, it starts up quickly.  If you go much above that, it gets sluggish on startup.  Searches start getting slower too.  This doesn't happen linearly, either.
The binary library file was also significantly larger than the XML library file.  As a rule, I've noticed that the XML tends to be a little bit smaller, but my binary file was almost twice the size of the XML.  In this case, I felt it was worth regenerating the library.
Okay, the usual procedure for this (rather drastic) action is to shut down iTunes, and purposefully corrupt the binary library file.  iTunes will then rebuild the binary from the XML "backup" when it next starts.  If you just delete the file, it'll assume you don't have a library and will wipe the XML too.  So, I tend to move the old binary into a backup directory and then create a new dummy file.
In the past, this has tended to work well.  Occasionally there are a few quirks:  in an old version of iTunes, I seem to remember the play counts got trashed.
This time, there was a problem.  My Podcasts section was empty!  The files were still there, but they didn't appear on the list.  I then noticed that there was a new static playlist called "Podcasts" with all my old podcast files, but as as normal audio files rather than categorised podcasts.  These items didn't appear anywhere in the Library section: just the playlists.  So, it's not seemingly possible to delete them from iTunes.
I tried adding the Podcasts again from the iTunes Store, foolishly hoping it would notice the existing files.  Unfortunately, it just downloads fresh copies instead, naming them with a " 1" suffix.
So, I deleted the files manually, and then used the excellent Super Remove Dead Tracks from Doug Adams's site.
This problem highlights the design bloat I spoke about in my previous post.  Back before podcasts, audiobooks, video and all the other stuff appeared in iTunes, everything was neatly kept in the Music Library, and it all worked.  It was possible for the filesystem and iTunes to get out-of-sync with both missing and excess files in the iTunes Music folder, but on the whole, it worked well.
Nowadays, the addition of these new media types to the increasingly-inaccurately-named iTunes has complicated everything.  There's no central folder of everything and stuff can seemingly fall through the cracks.  If a Podcast isn't in the Podcasts list, it won't appear anywhere.
I think Apple should build a new piece of software, called iMedia or something like that, for managing everything currently handled by iPod, iTunes, iPhoto, iPhone, Apple TV and Front Row.
They should also consider using something intrinsic to the OS -- such as Spotlight -- to manage the libraries themselves, rather than relying on easily-breakable and easy-to-desynchronise monolithic files.  At the very least, they should rework it using Core Data, and if I had my way, also add "proper" RDBMS support to Core Data so I can use MySQL as my music library index!
In the process, they should reconceptualise the whole thing.  How should a digital hub operate?  It should work well with multiple libraries at the same time, with network nodes as data suppliers, so families and housemates can share media.  It should allow offline media integration, such as Delicious Library, so I can organise and manage my books and DVDs too.  Ideally, I'd want it to be able to control DVD jukeboxes, so I could build the mother of all home entertainment media servers around a single Mac Mini and a bunch of external jukeboxes, sources and filestores.  It should be open enough to allow companies like Elgato to fully integrate stuff like EyeTV.
That's the kind of innovative thinking we've come to expect from Apple.  Instead, we've got bloated, inflexible creeping featurism of the kind we've come to expect from Microsoft.
Oh, one more thing.  I'm on iTunes 7.1.1 on OS X, and it's crashing more than it did before.  I've had it bomb out a few times while converting videos for iPod.  Not good.
In conclusion, I must say that I still prefer iTunes and iPod to the alternatives... by a long way.  They're just not as good as they could, or should, be.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>-2</slash:comments>
	
		<series:name><![CDATA[iTunes and iPod rant]]></series:name>
	</item>
		<item>
		<title>iPod Video Conversion in iTunes</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-video-conversion/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-video-conversion/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 May 2007 12:48:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bug]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ipod]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[itunes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rant]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[unicode]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[video]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-video-conversion/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The kludginess of video conversion for iPod in iTunes is another one of the things "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod".  I don't like the conversion process, and I particularly don't like the bug I think I've found.

Even before I got an iPod Video, I managed to accumulate a few videos in my iTunes collection.  Mostly music videos, in various formats, but a few other things too.  I've got a few from the iTunes Store, which transfer to the iPod just fine.  However, most are different formats and need re-encoding.
Apple have not made this as easy as they could.

"Movies" and "TV Shows" have their own sections in iTunes, but music videos appear in the music list.  This is inconsistent with the iPod, on which music videos get their own section in the "Videos" top-level menu.
As a result, it's difficult to focus just on the music videos for conversion.  You can use a Smart Playlist, but you don't get full control of the items in a playlist:  for example, you can't delete items without going to the main library list.  This is important later, after conversion.
You can't change the type of a video by bulk editing.  On import, my non-iTunes-purchased videos came up as "Movies" rather than "Music Videos".  To change this (and therefore decide where they appear on the iPod), you have to "Show Info", select "Video" and then change the "Video Kind" dropdown.  This function does not appear in the "Multiple Item Information" window usually used to edit groups of items.  The keyboard shortcuts for this procedure are also non-optimal, and this all translates to a lot of mouse work.
After a track is converted using "Convert Selection for iPod", it is not marked in any way.  The original is not unticked, tagged or labelled.  Instead, you have to look at the kind, such as "QuickTime movie file" or "MPEG-4 video file", and it's possible those are the same.  Otherwise, it's up to the Date Added column.
As the original files aren't disabled, they still trigger the warning dialogue on the next sync, saying that they're incompatible with the iPod.  The originals in my opinion should be unchecked so they don't get synced.  I'd ideally export the files out and then remove them altogether.  However, as there isn't an easy way to select those originals avoiding the converted versions, it's a chore.

Okay, all of those are design flaws.  Fairly annoying ones, too.  I've been of the opinion for a while that both iTunes and iPhoto were great packages in their day, but are in dire need of redesigns and rewrites.  They've lost their simplicity and elegance.  They're bloated.
The next thing, however, is a bug, demonstrated by this screenshot.  A number of the converted videos appear with blank names and artists on the iPod.  They play fine, but they're just not there.
In addition, it's also made the band's Music Videos entry appear six times:  three with the correct name, and three with a blank.  All six menus contain the same items, as above.
Upon investigation, all of these files are named fairly oddly.  They appear fine in the Show Info "Info" panel, but on the "Summary", there's a quirk:  the names are spaced out, and the file path has alternating underscores.  Checking the file paths and the iTunes Library XML file gives similar results:
I've seen this kind of thing before.  It looks like it's almost definitely a Unicode interpretation error.  As with most other modern string-handling APIs, NSStrings inside OS X (Cocoa) are stored with (at least?) two bytes per character, rather than the old-style one byte per character.  It's easy to make the mistake of failing to convert this back and assume one byte per character.
In the example above, the artist name -- R&#246;yksopp -- is clearly not plain ASCII, so I wouldn't be surprised if the programmers of iTunes's conversion interface failed to test for this problem.  However, I did also encounter the problem with some videos with plain English names and artists, too: my copy of Leonard Nimoy's "The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins" also came up blank.
To fix this problem, I just went into each item's "Show Info" in turn and retyped the names.  Fine for the few items I imported, but not if I'd had any more.
I think Apple's point with all of this is that you should buy all your videos from them.  Mine mostly came from "enhanced limited edition" CDs instead.
Incidentally, in the shots above, you might notice two different versions of the incredible "Remind Me" video by R&#246;yksopp.  I've discovered that there are (at least) two subtley-different versions of this video, and the one on the iTunes store isn't quite as good.  Apart from the gratuitous cartoon boobie shot, the non-iTunes version has a couple of little hidden jokes in the background, and a few more scenes.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>-3</slash:comments>
	
		<series:name><![CDATA[iTunes and iPod rant]]></series:name>
	</item>
		<item>
		<title>iPod Photo Bloat</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-photo-bloat/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-photo-bloat/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 May 2007 12:47:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bloat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[iphoto]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ipod]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[itunes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rant]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-photo-bloat/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the process of replacing my iPod, I've noticed a couple of things "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod".  After my previous rant about iPod reliability, I'm now onto the sloppy programming behind iPod's photo functions.

So, I started transferring all my media to the new unit.  The music went across fine.  Videos, not so much, but more on that later.  Photos, however, were taking hours to transfer.  iTunes was "optimising" the photos.  I remember this taking a while back when I got the previous iPod, but I'd forgotten how slow it was.
I've got about 19GB of photos, all neatly keyworded in iPhoto.  Since I got my iPod Photo two-and-a-bit years ago, I've kept a copy of my collection on my iPod: usually with "Include full resolution photos" ticked.
So, what's it doing?
It's decompressing the photos into YUV format at iPod screen resolution.
Each photo, regardless of the original file size is "thumbnailed" to a new file of about 851K on the new iPod Video, and marginally less on the iPod Photo and the Nano.  This is allegedly to offload some of the processing effort from the iPod to the host computer, so the iPod doesn't burn through batteries trying to do the instant photo scrolling thing.
Problems with this approach:

It takes a long time to convert all my photos.  I've got an iBook G4 1GHz, not an eight-core Big Mac.  Since the screen size is different on the new iPod, the whole process has to be done again.  I'm also not convinced it's thumbnailing particularly efficiently.  I bet ImageMagick would be faster.
It uses up a lot of space on the iPod.  Okay, I'm not likely to use up the 80GB any time soon, especially since my iBook doesn't have the disk space to store all that anyway.
It uses up a lot of space on the host machine: in my case, 9GB extra!  That's almost 10% of my laptop's HDD.
iTunes/iPhoto isn't well-behaved enough to clean up after itself.  The thumbnails have a nasty habit of sticking around.  If a photo is deleted, there's no guarantee the thumbnail will be deleted.  If you change iPod model (like I did), the old, useless, wrong-sized thumbnail will stay there.  If, after noticing this bloat, you disable some or all Photo syncing, the cache still sits there.  Considering how long the process can take, I understand this design decision, but I don't necessarily agree with it.
It takes ages just to transfer these thumbnails compared to transferring the (smaller!) originals.  Now that they've canned FireWire over the slower, less reliable USB2.0, iPod syncing is sluggish.  Piping this crapload of excess data around really doesn't help.

The thing is, I really don't think any of this is necessary!
Now that the iPod Video is better specced, why can't it do its own thumbnailing, and cache them locally?
And at the very least, why do they have to be possibly the least efficient file format?  JPEGs aren't hard to decode, and while I could understand the need for keeping lower resolution thumbs on the iPod, I can't see why JPEGs wouldn't do.  While admittedly the iPod uses hardware to decode video, it still manages to do some reasonably sweet 3D graphics in the new iPod Games, and I don't think they shoehorned a Radeon into the iPod, so the thing's capable of doing maths, to say the least.
As far as the hard drive is concerned, the standard reply is to get a bigger drive.  I've already got a 100GB drive in my iBook, and I still cling to the concept of portability, so an external drive is out.  If there was a good reason for this, I'd think about being more selective, but it's just waste and sloppy programming on the part of Apple.
It seems probable that Apple crammed in this functionality with the underpowered iPod Photo, and then failed to update the codebase.  I accept that the Nano might not have the oomph to do the work and would need the offloaded conversion, but then again, the Nano's not going to store a huge cache anyway!  When it comes to the larger, more powerful iPods, it should act differently.
I'm sure Apple aren't losing any sleep over this problem:  they're too busy working on the OS X-based iPhone and the inevitable touchy-feely non-phone-iPhone iPod that will accompany it.  That thing will presumably be able to do the thumbnails itself.
It still doesn't excuse the sloppy coding that's currently there.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>-6</slash:comments>
	
		<series:name><![CDATA[iTunes and iPod rant]]></series:name>
	</item>
		<item>
		<title>iPod Reliability</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-reliability/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-reliability/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 May 2007 12:47:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[80gb]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hardware-failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ipod]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ipod-video]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[itunes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rant]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-reliability/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Last week, I got a new iPod Video 80GB from eBay, and in the process of transferring my media a number of things caught my attention.  Some of these are known about already, but they're things "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod".  I'm covering these in a few separate posts, as I've got quite a bit to say on the subject.

Firstly, the failure of the old iPod.  Okay, this bit's the average iPod rant... nothing new here.
I've bought three iPods for myself now: a 20GB G3, a 60GB Photo, and this new 80GB Video.  However, I've owned more like six, thanks to AppleCare warranty replacements.  Although I'm known for having a "negative aura" when it comes to hardware (and am seen by some of my peers as the ultimate hardware tester), I've been careful with the iPods.  All have had an approved skin or case (usually an silicone iSkin), and have been treated well.  I haven't gone hiking, underwater or into space with them, or even regular commuting.  No significant drops either.  Even so, they keep failing.  I still haven't experienced the infamous battery problem, as none of my iPods have lasted long enough.
Last time, I took my 11-and-a-half month old iPod Photo 60GB on holiday with me to the Caribbean.  It started the "click of death" about one day into the trip.  I checked the warranty and I had only about a week left:  it would expire before I got back to civilisation.  So, I called my friend Henry to ask him to call AppleCare and ask them to let me buy the one-year extension when I got back.  They did.
Promptly, the iPod started working again.  I have no idea how Apple managed to reset the warranty trip remotely.  I'm guessing they have a satellite to do this.
Anyway, it worked fine all year.  There were no signs of failure, so I couldn't really get it fixed.  Last month, the extended warranty ran out again, and shortly afterwards, the click of death started again.  Within a day, it wasn't reliable enough to sync.
So, off to eBay I go.  To justify the cost of a new iPod, I sold my seldom-used PSP and games, plus the old iPod (clearly marked as faulty) and accessories which don't fit the new iPod anyway.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>-5</slash:comments>
	
		<series:name><![CDATA[iTunes and iPod rant]]></series:name>
	</item>
		<item>
		<title>Leaving Orange after ten years</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/12/01/leaving-orange/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/12/01/leaving-orange/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Dec 2006 11:46:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[6280]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cellnet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cellular]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[customer-services]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gsm]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mobile]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mobile-phone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mobile-phones]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nokia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[orange]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rant]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[three]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[vodafone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[x-series]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2006/12/01/leaving-orange/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I just called Orange customer relations to request my PAC code after finally deciding to move to "3" or Three as I'll call them from now.  I've been a contract customer with Orange for just over ten years, and I'm just no longer feeling the love.

Orange started off as an innovative company, seemingly unaffected by the failure of the related "Rabbit" CT2 enterprise.  Unlike Cellnet and Vodafone, the more conservative established alternatives at the time, Orange offered a whole slew of innovative features such as Line 2, free voicemail, free Call Waiting, free itemised billing, free insurance, free 0800 calls, inclusive minutes bundles, and most of all: lower prices, even on international calls.
To achieve these features, they worked closely with Nokia.  If I remember correctly, Orange were the ones responsible for getting features like Line 2 and voicemail signalling into the standards.  Rather than just selling a premade product, they wanted to create new and innovative ways of using a mobile phone.
Orange Care was the real killer app for me, though.  I remember trashing my phone on several occasions and getting a free replacement very quickly: once I got a replacement 7110 delivered to me at work two hours after I'd accidentally dropped the old one in the (clean and pine-scented) toilet.  No charge.  This service apparently was the cause of the delayed releases of new handsets, as Orange sent new models back to the drawing board when they didn't live up to the QA standards necessary for the insurance scheme.
This was the old Orange.  This was before Hans Snook left.  This was before Pay-As-You-Go.  This was before they got bought out.
Since then, Orange have seemed to stop innovating, both from a technical and a business perspective.  Customer service quality has plummeted.  It used to take about two rings to get through to a very well-trained CS rep, who would quickly put you through to 3rd Line support if it was clear that you knew what you were talking about. Nowadays it sometimes takes ages just to get through to someone with a script in front of them, and they seemed to be well trained at saying "No", and "We don't offer that", and other disappointing responses.
Orange Care is now £6 a month extra, and includes a whole bunch of exclusions and a rather hefty excess.  In other words, it's the same as everyone else's network.  I haven't actually used Orange Care in about five or six years, but it's something I've paid for diligently anyway, for the peace-of-mind.  I could have bought about five new phones on the money I've spent on Orange Care.
The final straw was a fairly trivial note I just noticed at the bottom of last month's Orange bill:  "...We will be charging £1.50 for itemised billing."  Now, I don't actually care *that* much, as I rarely read my phone bill anyway, but I remember one of those little things that made Orange better than Cellnet and Vodafone was their free itemised billing.  It's the principle.  Yet another sign that they've regressed.
The offers given to new customers are a hell of a lot better than those available to old, loyal customers, but even those offers are far too expensive for what you get. Back when I joined, you got everything for £15 a month.  That's on a 12 month contract, with a free decent phone included.  Now I'm paying almost £30 for pretty much the same deal: 60 minutes of talk time and 30 texts.  I've been paying them anywhere from about £20 to £100 a month for ten years, and usually overpaying them if anything.  I'm only using an average of 42 minutes a month, but they can't offer me a cheaper tariff.
So, here comes Three.  Dumb name, and one that makes it difficult to Google, but their attitude seems strangely familiar.
Looking a bit deeper, I find out that Three's full name is "Hutchison 3G UK Limited".  Not too different from the "Hutchison Telecommunications UK Limited" that launched Orange back in 1994.  Back then, "Orange" was a pretty odd name for a mobile phone network, just as Three is an odd name now.  Back then, Orange were the only ones risking running on a solely 2G phone network, while Cellnet and Vodafone's relied on 1G.  Not too dissimilar from Three rolling out a 3G network so quickly, and handing off the 2G fallback to O2 (and soon to Orange, fortunately).
In so many ways, Three reminds me of what Orange used to be.
Three is the new Orange.
And today, they've launched "X-Series"... flat-fee mobile broadband with free Skype-to-Skype calls.  £5 a month.  This thing could kickstart the stagnant mobile internet market.  It's the kind of industry-wrenching, business-plan-defying fantastic lunacy we used to expect from Orange.  Exactly the kind of thing that makes their less insightful competitors poo-pooh it, and their more insightful competitors poo-poo themselves.  It's what the consumers want, and it's going to happen.  Everyone else is on catch-up now.
Considering the way I currently use my mobile, I'm not going to go for "X-Series" for now.  I can't justify the expense considering how much I actually use my mobile, and I also don't want the Nokia N73 I'd have to use to get it:  I'm sick of "smartphones", which I think are more suitably named "slow-and-crashy-phones".  I've been using a Nokia 6680 for about a year, and it's just slow and crap.  My friend Steve has an N70, which is similarly slow and crap.  I had a 7650 before then, as a result of the Orange video trial I participated in, and it's just slow and crap.  I wouldn't mind having a Blackberry or something like that, but right now, I'd just be happier with a small phone that works well, as long as it's got Bluetooth.  I could even do without a camera.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, Orange are just yet another network now.  Very full of themselves, knowing full well they've got market share, and they just do not care about customer churn.  They know they've got a good network, so why try harder?  France Telecom seems content to just sit on the cash-cow.  After talking to Orange CR for a few minutes to get my PAC code, I don't think they (or their computer) cares if I leave or not.  If anything, the girl on the phone just got slightly snippy and argumentative with me, before giving up.
So, I've signed up to Three.  £15 a month for 18 months, and then up to £30 a month, although I'll probably renegotiate at that point and perhaps move somewhere else.  I get a Nokia 6280 refurb, which should do the trick.  It's got iSync compatibility, and it's not a "smartphone", so it has a chance of actually working smoothly.  I'll get 600 minutes a month for six months and then 300 minutes after that.  2000 texts a month for six months, and then down to 1000 texts, which is still about 30 times what I actually need.  It also includes MSN Messenger "free for life", which could be fun.
On paper, this looks like the right move.  I have no idea it'll actually play out, but I must say I can't wait for my new phone to arrive tomorrow(!)
I'm going to transfer my number over to Three, but I'll get an Orange PAYG SIM just for fun (and for Orange Wednesdays), and I'll probably get my phone unlocked so I've got a spare.  Otherwise, I'm no longer a loyal Orange customer.
Sort it out, Orange.  You suck.  I'm Three's bitch now.
Three, please don't disappoint me now.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
	
		<series:name><![CDATA[Leaving mobile phone company "X" for "Y"]]></series:name>
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		<title>Stupid annoying missed call alerts</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/07/20/stupid-annoying-missed-call-alerts/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/07/20/stupid-annoying-missed-call-alerts/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Jul 2006 17:54:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[08009157111]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[0800_915_7111]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[annoying]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[complaints]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[completely_pointless]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[icstis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ofcom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rant]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[recorded_message]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[spam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[stupid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[telephone_preference_service]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[TRG_Europe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[uk_telecom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[unsolicited]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2006/07/20/stupid-annoying-missed-call-alerts/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[[... from companies I will (now) never buy from or do business with] Over the past few weeks I've been getting some missed call alerts on my mobile phone.  These aren't the normal type you get when the phone actually rings:  these are the text messages I get from Orange when the call is too short (this case) or my phone's off or out-of-range.  The numbers: 0800 915 7111 and 0800 915 7113

Googling for these numbers only gives me a discussion on uk.telecom.mobile of people with about as much clue as me on who the culprit is.
I signed up to the Telephone Preference Service years ago, so I shouldn't get unsolicited calls.  Unfortunately, the TPS seems utterly toothless.  They don't seem to have any enforcement powers whatsoever, and from my experience companies that claim to abide by the TPS completely ignore it.  I've made complaints to the TPS before and the data seems to go nowhere.  The extra problem is that these calls aren't necessarily sales calls.  I assume they are, but to me they're just silent calls if anything.
So, next step is the ICSTIS who also seem to be completely pointless, but they do offer a (sometimes) useful tool.  Admittedly, ICSTIS is only meant to regulate premium-rate services, but they're still part of this broken regulation system, so I hate them too. Their tool does indicate that although they don't regulate freephone (0800) numbers, their records state that the number is provided by Torch Communications Ltd.
Unfortunately, this doesn't help much:  it's usually just the company that provided the phone number, and not the company that actually uses the phone number.
I also tried the Information Commissioner who is supposedly meant to have something to do with this issue.  After wading through a woolly PDF about their complaints procedure, I think I understand that they have no powers either.
So, to Ofcom.  Their complaints page just points me back to the TPS, stating that I should make my complaint to them.  In the meantime, however, I emailed a rather bolshy note to "the office of the Secretary to the Corporation Graham Howell (graham.howell@ofcom.org.uk)" as shown in the "Complaints about Ofcom" page, saying (to paraphrase) "Belt up and sort this thing out".
Anyway, on calling the original phone number (0800 915 7111) I get a recorded message:
"Thank you for calling.  The call made to you was from TRG Europe on behalf of one of [his?] clients: a company which we understand you are familiar with.  The call was not urgent and we apologise for missing you on this occasion.  We'll try to contact you again soon.  The UK call centre industry is anxious to promote good practice in customer communications.  However, if you are concerned about receiving potentially unexpected telephone calls from businesses, you can register to stop them by calling the Telephone Preference Service on 0845 070 0707.  That's 0845 070 0707."
Unfortunately, they don't give the option to talk to themselves!  As I can't tell which client they're calling on behalf of, I can't really gauge how useful the TPS has been.  This could quite easily be on behalf of a company that I have "had business dealings with" as I do, in fact, live in a consumption-driven society and so I do sometimes BUY THINGS FROM COMPANIES!  If I find out who this is on behalf of, there's a good chance I will not have any further dealings with them.
Googling for "TRG Europe" is slightly confusing as the number-one hit is "www.iSky.co.uk" rather than the number-three "www.trgeurope.com".  It looks like iSky has now rebranded (read: has been bought by) TRG Europe Plc. This seems to be a company that offers "outsourced telephone call handling and relationship management" which (as far as I'm concerned) translates to: "battery farms full of miserable, ill-trained and ill-informed twenty-somethings whose sole purpose is to call me up and annoy me."
So, I emailed them asking if it was them.  I hold out zero hope that my email will be answered, but I suppose it's worth trying.  I might get around to calling TRG Europe directly, and asking them whether it's them.  Their HQ is only about five miles from where I live and close to the local Tesco, so I might pop round on my way back from there.
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, this is not exactly a shocking breach of human rights or anything like that.  However, low-level evil such as cold-calling is one of the primary causes of the ongoing fall of western civilisation.  For more details, read "Good Omens" by Terry Pratchett.  This practice probably adds annoyance and stress to millions of people every day, causing them to be rude and intolerant with their peers, friends and families.  In addition, the problem seems to be getting worse.
The other reason this should be dealt with is that it can be easily stopped.  Unlike email spam which is practically impossible to trace, this is easily traceable.  There's no technological reason why this can't be prevented.
There are laws in place to fight this kind of behaviour, but unfortunately Ofcom, ICO, ICSTIS, TPS and the other quango-ish bodies just can't get themselves organised.  What we need are the directors of these companies to be fined and punished directly to make cold-calling, silent calling, unsolicited communication (eg. Fax and SMS spam) such an impossible legal minefield that a company will only think of calling a customer if they've got permission to do so from that customer.  How many UK voters would actually disagree with such a stance?
For those who reach this page by angrily hammering 08009157111, 08009157112, 08009157113, 08009157117, 08009157118, 0800 915 7111, 0800 915 7112, 0800 915 7113, 0800 915 7117, 0800 915 7118, or any other combination of these insipid numbers into their browser's search box, I'm afraid I have no good news to report so far.  If you've got further than me, or you agree (or disagree) then please get in touch by leaving a comment on the bottom of this page.
Grr. Bastards.]]></description>
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